


Le phare

by Aza (sazandorable)



Series: PeterMartin Week 2020 [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, M/M, general unhealthiness and mutual manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:33:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27478108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazandorable/pseuds/Aza
Summary: For PeterMartin week 2020, day 1: lighthouse.Martin gets lost in the Lonely, and then gets himself un-lost.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Peter Lukas, Martin Blackwood/Peter Lukas
Series: PeterMartin Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009578
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Le phare

**Author's Note:**

> titled after the Yann Tiersen [album](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIYM_AT4FkQ&list=PLg6AQcUUYYoDzGBfVU3g4EF4XKPYBMMpt) \+ [track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Dv1Sp_g3U). and also it's just. french. for 'the lighthouse'.

Martin has been having trouble sleeping, lately. His mind is wandering and his eyes prickling; he lets his eyelids fall shut on a statement about the last inhabitants of a dying village (Extinction, or just the Lonely?), just for a few seconds’ break, just to let them rest for a bit, and opens them to nothing.

The statement is still there, Martin is aware of it on some distant, detached level, but he doesn’t actually _see_ it, nor does he feel the texture or the weight of the paper at his fingertips. All his senses are dulled, muted, the colour of the fog spreading over his eyes like a cloud of milk in a cup of tea.

Nothing unusual.

He sighs, presses his functionally-empty hands against his face (this, he feels; by definition, in the Lonely, he can feel himself perfectly). Peter hasn’t been in this morning, hasn’t checked on him in a few days. Martin doesn't have the time to waste one, two, twelve hours sitting here, waiting for Peter to notice and come fetch him out. They’re already wasting so much time. He’s already so tired.

He doesn’t start walking. There’s no point in walking, in here. Loneliness is not a place; it can be a physical space, but that’s only its simplest iteration. So Martin doesn’t walk to the beach, doesn’t stand from his chair and sit down on the shingle. He just crosses his arms over his knees and stares out to the sea. When he lays his chin on his arms, his sweater is already damp, and he tastes salt.

He doesn’t realise he's been reaching out, looking, searching, until he finds it — light bursts across his vision and he shields his eyes with his forearm with a pained yelp that gets lost and swallowed in the thick fog — then it’s gone. Then back, and gone again, and Martin blinks until he can make out, through fog and twinkling floating spots, a lighthouse, right there on a nearby rocky outcropping, and a large shape next to him, suddenly silhouetted in the rotating light. When the light goes, the shape stays.

“Huh,” says Peter. He wipes down the cuff of the sleeve of his thick coat, as if dusting off the marine dew condensating on the fabric, or the wisps of loneliness curling around and clinging to it. “Well, that’s disappointing. This is the exact opposite of what we want, Martin.”

“I know,” Martin mumbles in his arms, not bothering to correct that ‘ _we_ ’.

His heart is thrashing in his chest, as fast and painful as the light that continues to rotate and blind him. It is what _he_ ’s been wanting: a step forward, a little control on it, finally, not yet the ability to get in and out at will but still something, a handhold, a grip, the ability to influence what's happening to him, a tiny bit of power to fight back.

And he staunchly ignores what it might mean, that the first thing he has managed to do, the first thing he has tried, was to find Peter, that when left alone with himself, Martin didn't try to get out, but to remain alone, together, with Peter.


End file.
